End of the World in Breslau

by Marek Krajewski

  “At the baths,” Smolorz stammered, “the Baron’s bodyguard caught me. Forced me to undress. The exercise hall. Climbing bars. They took a photograph of me there. Me, naked, prick in hand. Then, against the same bars, your wife, her mouth open. They said: ‘Stop following us or Mock’s going to get this photograph. A photo-collage. Of his wife and you …’”

  The world was in flames, lovers bit off each other’s lips, faithless wives betrayed their husbands at swimming baths, musical blondes with gentle, childish voices knelt before aristocrats, searching for excitement, and friends forgot their friendship. The world was in flames, and Lucretius, singer of fire, took a drug, supposedly to make him more attractive to his frigid chosen one, the cause of his madness. The world was in flames while the indifferent gods sat apathetic, idle and aimless in a luxurious realm between the worlds.

  Mock pulled out his Walther and pressed it to Smolorz’s hair, now plastered down with snow. He turned to face the wall. Mock let off the safety catch. In a wretched room, a little red-haired boy eats semolina. “Is he going to kill Papa?” he asks a young Gypsy in Czech. Mock put away his gun and sat down in the snow. He was drunk. He could feel the weight of the gun in his coat pocket. The dark well slowly filled with a carpet of snow. Smolorz waited for his punishment to be meted out while Mock lay there, pressing his face to the ground. After five minutes he stood up and told Smolorz to turn around. His subordinate shook with fear.

  “I didn’t do anything with her. It’s a photo-collage,” he croaked.

  “Listen to me, Smolorz,” Mock said, brushing the snow from his coat.

  “Stop drinking and keep tailing von Hagenstahl. My wife might get in touch with him. Even if the Baron notices you and carries out his threat, you don’t have to worry. They’ll just send me the photo-collage. I already know about it, and I won’t do anything to you. Now sober up, and follow Baron von Hagenstahl’s every move. That’s all.”

  Smolorz finally managed to comb his hair with his fingers, buttoned up his jacket, adjusted his crooked hat and went inside. In the dark corridor, Zupitza’s mighty hand held him back. Wirth stepped out into the courtyard and approached Mock.

  “Shall we let him go?” he asked.

  “Yes, you don’t have to follow him. His conscience will do the job well enough.”

  Wirth gave Zupitza the appropriate sign.

  † “The best thing in the world – the last swig at Gabi Zelt’s”.

  † Flaming walls of the world.

  BRESLAU, FRIDAY, DECEMBER 9TH, 1927

  SEVEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

  It snowed throughout Saturday and for half of Sunday. The city was swathed in a white shroud that muffled every sound. Instead of the clip-clop of hacks’ hooves, Breslauers heard the faint whisper of sledges gliding through the streets; instead of the clatter of women’s shoes on pavement, the crunch of snow; instead of the splashing of dirty water, the dry crack of ice. Windowpanes were covered in blossoms of frost, chimneys belched sooty smoke, skaters raced on the ice near the Regierungsbezirk Schlesien building, servants used snow to clean carpets, and carters smelled of booze. On Sunday afternoon it stopped snowing. Frost bit hard. Light and thick layers of snow clumped together in coarse clods. Their clean surfaces were cut by dog urine and stained with horse excrement. In the alleys around Salzring, homeless people chose spots on which to die, and criminals locked themselves in their safe, warm, fetid caves between Neuweltgasse and Weissgerbergasse. Newspapers told of the swindles of Willi Wang who, disguised as a hussar, had robbed and infatuated maids and staid married women, and of two ghastly and elaborate murders. Their perpetrator was of interest only to journalists, and he already had several psychological profiles to his name.

  All this was unknown to the man the newspapers called “the star of Breslau’s criminal police”, or “the hound with an unerring instinct”. This “genius of criminal detection” had been holding his head, shattered by a hangover, under a stream of icy water for the third time that morning, and now his servant, Adalbert, was drying his tangled hair and red nape with a coarse towel.

  Without looking in the mirror, Mock ran a bone comb through his hair, just about managed to fasten his stiff collar, and went through to the dining-room where a jug of coffee was steaming, blackcurrant preserve oozed sweetly through the cheeky recesses of a Kaiser roll’s crispy crust, and an egg yolk trembled temptingly in its slippery white membrane. But Mock had no appetite, and not because of the port which had doubtless tipped the balance of fluids in his stomach the previous night, but because of the presence of Criminal Director Mühlhaus. The latter was sitting at the table, greedily eyeing the breakfast and singlemindedly drilling into his blocked pipe with a small skewer. Mock greeted his chief and sat down opposite him. He poured himself and his guest some coffee. Then silence.

  “I apologise for the intrusion at this time of the morning, Mock.” Mühlhaus had finally managed to clean out his pipe and broke the silence. “I hope I haven’t woken Frau Sophie.”

  Mock did not reply and spread the yolk, which tasted of iron, around his mouth.

  “Smolorz did not turn up for work on Saturday,” Mühlhaus continued. “Do you know why?”

  Mock drank a mouthful of leaden coffee. Shreds of the crispy Kaiser roll pricked his gums like steel filings.

  “Continue with your silence if you wish,” Mühlhaus sighed as he got up from the chair. “Don’t say a word, have a schnapps and remember the good old days … They’re over. Never to return.”

  Mühlhaus straightened his bowler, stashed his pipe in its leather case and sluggishly left the table.

  “Adalbert!” Mock shouted. “Breakfast for the Criminal Director!”

  Then he took a huge gulp of coffee and experienced an odd harmony of tastes: dark-roasted coffee with the burned aftertaste of strong wine, traces of which unsettled his stomach.

  “Nothing returns from the past,” Mock glanced at Mühlhaus, who was once again making himself comfortable at the table. “That is the wisest tautology I’ve ever come across.”

  “Seneca captured it more aptly.” Cutlery and plates clattered as Adalbert laid them down in front of Mühlhaus. “Quod retro est, mors tenet.”†

  “Seneca was too wise to equate death with oblivion.” Mock ran his tongue across his coarse palate.

  “Perhaps.” Mühlhaus dug a spoon into his egg exactly as he had dug the skewer into his pipe a moment earlier. The Kaiser roll crunched between his rotten teeth. “But you know that better than I do.”

  “Yes, I know. What has passed is not only in death’s possession; it is also in the treasury of my memory.” Mock lit a gold-tipped cigarette. Smoke swirled above the table. “And over memory, as over death, we have no control. Although that is not altogether so. In committing suicide, I choose one form of death, and in fighting I decide whether I am going to die with honour or not. Memory is stronger than death. Unlike death, it gives me no choice, and sends images from the past before my eyes against my will. I cannot wipe my memory clean unless I want to end up in a lunatic asylum …”

  Mock paused and crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. Mühlhaus sensed the approach of the moment which would bring irreversible consequences. Either Mock would tell him everything and, in so doing, free Mühlhaus from having to make any sort of decision, or he would say nothing and have to fill out a dreary form – the final document in his police personnel file.

  “I request a month’s unpaid leave, please, Criminal Director.” Mock turned a cigar cutter in his fingers.

  “And your reasons?” Mühlhaus finished eating and swallowed the rest of his coffee, tilting his head as abruptly as if he were drinking a shot of pure spirits.

  There was silence. It was Mock’s choice: either he would receive Mühlhaus’ help, or he would be dismissed.

  “I have to find my wife. She’s left me. Run away. She’s probably in Berlin.” The Counsellor had made his choice.

  Mühlhaus went to the window and waved his hand.
r />   “Excellent breakfast,” he said, lighting his pipe. “But now we have to go. Councillor Eduard Geissen has been murdered.”

  Mock was well acquainted with Geissen, a town councillor and a man of unimpeachable honesty who adored Wagner’s operas above all, and ended each sitting of the Silesian Landtag with a dramatic appeal for the construction of a summer opera house.

  “Where?” Mock swiftly fastened his amber cufflinks.

  “In a brothel.” Mühlhaus squeezed on his too-small bowler in front of the mirror.

  “Which one?” Mock slipped his arms into the coat held out by Adalbert.

  “On Burgfeld, near the old coach house.” Mühlhaus opened the door, distributing a scented cloud of smoke.

  “How?” Mock stroked Argos and made his way down the stairs.

  “Someone hung him upside down.” Mühlhaus’ heels drummed on the wooden steps. “They put his leg through a noose made from piano wire and tied the other end to a chandelier. When his blood had flowed to his head, they severed his hip artery. Probably with a bayonet. He bled to death.”

  “Where was Geissen’s whore?”

  “Next to him. Butchered with the same bayonet,” Mühlhaus said, allowing a bald man in a pince-nez through the door. The man glowered at Mock, and the Counsellor remembered the glint of those pince-nez from two occasions: once when Sophie had wrapped herself around his hips, and he had tried to grind her into the wall of the corridor, and again on that Thursday night, when he had raped his wife and she ran downstairs in a panic, clattering her heels. Now the eyes behind the pince-nez glinted with oppressive sleeplessness, scorn and derision. Mock, stunned by these recollections, stopped abruptly on the pavement.

  “I have to find my wife.”

  A sledge pulled up at the curb beside them. The horse stank of stables, its driver of ill-digested moonshine. In the sledge sat a young man in a bowler, smoking a cigar. The horse thrashed its hoof against the frozen snow impatiently.

  “Someone else will find her,” Mühlhaus said, nodding towards the man in the sledge. “Someone she doesn’t know.”

  “She knows everyone,” Mock said. “All the men and all the women. But perhaps not this one. I haven’t yet heard that she’s had any dealings with queers.”

  Mühlhaus took Mock by the shoulder and pushed him gently towards the sledge. The young man smiled in greeting and tapped his finger in military style against the brim of his bowler. Mock saluted back.

  “Let me introduce you, Counsellor,” said Mühlhaus, “to Private Detective Mr Rainer Knüfer, from Berlin.”

  “Have you lived in Berlin for long?” Mock extended his hand to Detective Knüfer.

  “Since birth.” Knüfer swiftly squeezed Mock’s right hand and passed him a business card. “I know the city as well as I do my own apartment. I can find every house-bug there.”

  Nobody laughed except Detective Knüfer. The sledge glided away. Snow crunched beneath its runners, and Mock’s skull crunched in the vice of his hangover. Horses’ hooves thumped at his temples, and snow, mixed with salt and sand, got in under his eyelids. Despite the biting cold, the Counsellor removed his hat, fanned himself with it and in one swift movement caught Knüfer by the throat.

  “You can find every house-bug?” He peered at Knüfer with eyes of lead. “You son of a whore, my wife is not some house-bug which has wormed its way under your wallpaper.”

  Mühlhaus tugged him by the forearm. Mock collapsed on the rear seat of the sledge. Knüfer cleared his throat and threw away his cigar butt. An old woman selling oranges swore loudly as she searched for the butt among her frozen fruit. Mühlhaus held Mock by the arm, while Knüfer watched indifferently as a mongrel ran across Augustastrasse. Mock spread himself out comfortably and rubbed his red ears.

  “I’ll find your wife,” Knüfer said dryly. “When I spoke of house-bugs, I had my own apartment in mind, of course, and not Berlin. Please forgive me.”

  “And vice versa,” Mock retorted. “What do you need to know about my wife?”

  “Everything. Most of my cases concern missing persons.” He pulled a printed sheet of thick paper from his briefcase. “I’ve drawn up a special questionnaire. Some questions may be intimate and embarrassing, but you should still answer them, even if it’s only with ‘Don’t know’. Please attach a recent photograph of your wife and have it delivered to me at Hotel Königshof on Claasenstrasse by two o’clock at the latest. Telephone me at a quarter past two, please. I may have some additional questions. The telephone number of the hotel is on the reverse of my business card. My train leaves for Berlin at three.”

  The sledge came to a halt, letting a peasant’s cart pass.

  “Now I bid you goodbye.” Knüfer jumped down gracefully, gathered speed and, like a child, slid a long way across a frozen puddle on the corner near Spingarn’s tobacconists, where street sellers usually set out their wares. Now, in their place, there were a few teenagers wearing caps full of holes, darned jumpers and woollen gloves. These novice thugs scratched the ice with their skates as they spun and danced. Knüfer came to a stop on the other side of the puddle, right next to a metal crate beneath which burned a small fire imprisoned in an iron grate. The detective reached into his coat pocket and the seller opened the lid of the crate, fished a fat frankfurter out of the boiling water and slipped it straight into Knüfer’s hand.

  “Shouldn’t those boys be at school?” Mühlhaus asked, looking at his watch.

  “I don’t know. But I do know they prefer being on an ice-rink than under the eye of some tutor or alcoholic father.” Mock took a woollen headband from his coat pocket and pulled it over his ears. “You knew about everything. Hence the brave detective summoned so speedily from Berlin. It happened only a few days ago. My wife ran off, and here we have this Knüfer … How did you know, sir?”

  “Walls have ears, Mock,” Mühlhaus answered after a moment’s hesitation. “And the best ears belong to the walls of that tiny courtyard behind Gabi Zelt’s bar.”

  “Thank you, sir. You’re right, it is better that someone she doesn’t know looks for her.”

  They stopped talking and squinted against the furious glare of the sun as it lit up icicles hanging from the roof of the investigative jail on NeueGraupner-Strasse. Mock glanced through the questionnaire and took a sharpened pencil from his coat pocket. With swift movements, he dissected his unfaithful wife’s character as if with a lancet, beginning with her external features:

  “Age: 24; 166 cm; weight: about 60 kg; colour of hair: light blonde; colour of eyes: green; particular characteristics: prominent bust.”

  They drove into Nicolaivorstadt, long famed for its sanctuaries of Aphrodite. They passed the barracks on Schweidnitzer Stadtgraben, then Königsplatz, and found themselves between All Saints’ Hospital and the Arsenal. Mock studied the questionnaire and, with a few strokes of his pencil, recounted Sophie’s past: the old and impoverished Baron of Passau throws his fifth daughter into the air; this fifth daughter, a princess and the apple of her father’s eye, prays in their private chapel, blonde plaits arranged in an elaborate crown; and there she is sitting on the veranda of a house smothered in Virginia creepers, snuggling into the fur of an enormous St Bernard.

  “Place of birth: Passau; accent: slight, Bavarian; religion: Roman Catholic; religious commitment: vestigial, ceremonial; contact with family: none; family’s residence: Passau, Munich; contact with friends: Philipp, Baron von Hagenstahl, aristocrat; Elisabeth Pflüger, violinist”.

  Mühlhaus and Mock walked into a dirty yard on Burgfeld. Mock, who until recently had worked in Department II, the Vice Department of the Breslau Police Praesidium, knew very well that the owner of this one-storeyed building, converted from a coach house, had gone to America for a spell. He also knew that the villa had been rented to a certain Hungarian who conducted various business transactions with Wirth and Zupitza. Above all, he spun a small fortune from a profession as ancient as the world itself.

  In the doorway stood a uniformed ma
n in a field-grey greatcoat. A Mauzer 08 protruded ominously from his unfastened holster. When he saw Mühlhaus and Mock, he saluted, two fingers to the peak of a shako decorated in the centre with a many-pointed star.

  “Sergeant Krummheltz from the fifth district at your command.”

  “You’re free to go, Krummheltz”, said Mühlhaus. “And not a word about what you’ve seen here. The case is being taken over by the Murder Commission of the Police Praesidium”.

  “I don’t talk much,” Krummheltz replied in all seriousness.

  “Very good.” Mühlhaus extended his hand to Krummheltz and entered the building. Girls in petticoats, dressing gowns and curlers sat around on sofas and armchairs. In the exhausted, hollowed eyes of one, Mock detected a flash of recognition. Ehlers was standing on the stairs taking down their statements. In a weary voice, he repeated the same dry questions and received the same hopeless epiphorae: “I was asleep. I don’t know”, “I never asked. I don’t know”, “That’s impossible. I don’t know”. “I don’t know, I don’t know” – Mock’s mind wandered to the points in Knüfer’s questionnaire. “Is she taciturn, or talkative, or impulsive, or well-balanced … I don’t know anything about the person closest to me …”

  Mühlhaus and Mock walked down a narrow corridor flanked by doors, trails of many a human humiliation. Mühlhaus pushed one open.

  “I know, I know for sure.” Mock fixed his eyes on the questions designed to expose his wife’s complex mental universe. “She’s not intelligent, she’s jealous and deceitful … She’s probably addicted to cocaine. She’s worth loving and killing for. For many long years I never noticed she was a cocaine user … I didn’t know her at all; all I knew was the concept I had of Sophie, not the living woman of blood and flesh who” – here a quotation came to mind – “‘isn’t a butterfly flitting in a pink mist and sometimes has to go to the bathroom’.”

  The bald crown of the pathologist, Doctor Lasarius, was glistening with sweat. In accordance with so-called police procedure, he had not even opened the curtains; the only thing he was allowed to touch were the corpses of the two who had been murdered. They were still warm. Holding a torch handle between his teeth, Lasarius was jotting down some comments in a notebook. Councillor Eduard Geissen’s body was hanging from a chandelier that resembled a spider with wax-glued limbs. One of the deceased’s legs had been tied to one such limb with piano wire. His hands were bound with the same, while his other leg hung at a peculiar angle, as if it had been dislocated at the hip. Stuffed into his mouth was a piece of material torn from a sheet, on his head a deep slash. His hairy back and buttocks were criss-crossed by blue threads of swellings. Mock took one look at the girl and surmised that these injuries had been inflicted by the whip she still clasped in her hand. He approached the dead prostitute. The protruding chin was somewhat familiar. He tried to remember where he had seen her before.